This Game We Play
by Prosper-the-XVIII
Summary: Effie Trinket's life has been an interesting one...dealing with drunken mentors, sending kids to their deaths every year, putting up with a vainglorious older brother who thinks the sun shines out of his arse and loves to make her life miserable and keeping her relationship with the Master of Ceremonies under wraps, all the while with her platinum smile on her face. Effie drabble.


Effie could remember the first time she had watched the Games. She had been three years old. She had buried her face in her mother's chest and refused to look for a whole hour. Then she had heard Claudius Templesmith's voice, wrongly assumed that it was all over and opened her eyes to a gritty rerun of a few of the worst deaths from the bloodbath. She had run out of the room screaming, and refused to even enter the lounge for the next week. The nightmares had lasted for several months.

The next year, her older brother, Prospero, had forced her to sit and watch every minute of every day the Tributes spent in the arena, every door in the house locked so that she couldn't leave. Even at the age of seven, Prospero had loved to devise ways to make her squirm, be they mental torture like that, hiding in her closet until three in the morning and jumping out with a toy sword when she was asleep or framing her for doing (normally self-inflicted) things to him that nobody exact their silicon-brained twit of a mother would believe could have been inflicted by a four-year old girl. She was almost sure that he was still grounded for the Hunger Games incident, even thirty years later. Both of her parents worked directly with the Games - her mother a part of the District Two prep team and her father the head of the muttation laboratory - so consequently they didn't know until they had come home from a fortnight of sleeping either on the desk in the lab or one of the hotel-type rooms in the Remake Centre, but Evelynna. their long-suffering nanny, hadn't slept for more than two consecutive minutes the entire time thanks to the nightmares that Prospero had inflicted upon her by making her watch what was quite frankly horrifically unsuitable for a child, especially one such as her.

She had developed a crush on the Master of Ceremonies, Caesar Flickerman, when she was twelve. Six years later, when she left home, she discovered that he inhabited the penthouse above her new apartment. She never did anything regarding this, however; she still had a thing about the man, whom she had never met, though how anyone could make the deaths of innocent children seem so exciting was beyond her. She was hellbent on avoiding meeting him unless she had to, just in case fame had gotten to his head and he was a total moron in real life.

Her dad, Leonis Beufort Trinket, had twisted a few arms and managed to get her a job as the District 12 escort when she was about eighteen; it had been his final condition for retiring - that, and Prospero had managed to worm his way in the agreement and gotten into the control centre. Effie had a feeling that he was to blame for the fact that her Tributes very seldom lasted more than about five minutes, but there was no proof of the fact. This was ten years after the second Quarter Quell - Haymitch Abernathy, that year's victor, had won over several girls that had at the time been about her current age and consequently they had been beating down the doors to get job applications when Flux Port show - uptight, misogynistic fifty-something notorious for his Tracker Jack addiction and lack of a sense of humour - had announced his retirement, even years after the at the time heartthrob's victory.

Indigo Alodia Nair, her mom, had been adopted as her stylist, and she made her first appearance for the cameras at District Twelve's reaping. She could remember everything. Her naturally chocolate brown hair had been bleached white blonde and streaked with turquoise and silver, arranged into huge barrel curls to her shoulders. She had been wearing a chiffon sleeveless suit jacket in the same shade as her hair and a skin-tight black dress. Her hair, necklace and shoes had been adorned with butterflies. She had no idea why she retained this information, but she had. She couldn't remember her Tributes' names from that year, but both had died in the bloodbath. She hadn't been there to see it, however. Haymitch - who had already turned to alcoholism a mere year after his victory and was in truth, balshy, intolerant and badly-mannered - had tripped her up on the stairs by 'accident' whilst she had been wearing eight-inch heels, and she had been sitting in A&E when her dad called her to tell her that they had both died; the girl to the District Five female and the boy had stabbed himself almost straight afterwards. They had edited the footage to make it look like it had been an accident.

She had first met Caesar when she had been sitting at home nursing a broken ankle (this had been thanks to the first of many 'Haymitch incidents'.) Her fears about him had been proven completely wrong on that meeting; he had heard about what had happened to her on the grape vine and had come to find out if she was okay. As soon as she could walk unaided again, they had made a habit of going out for drinks together on Fridays; it had started out as friends, but things changed eventually and incognito of course - the Capitol's tabloids made a habit of blowing even the tiniest things way up out of proportion. When Caesar's mom, Claudia Flickerman - an ex presenter of the Games - had been spotted in public holding hands with the President, the papers had made such a meal out of it that half of the Capitol still thought that they were married.

A month after the end of her first Games as an escort, her mom had died of cancer they never knew she had been suffering from. She had told them that the surgeries had been breast enlargements and she just kept wearing the pastel wigs she was known for when she started losing her hair. Effie still wasn't sure whether she had done this out of wanting to protect her family, or just vanity.

That was when she stripped out the dye from her own hair, cut it short (peroxide and Capitol hair dye were two things that didn't play nice with the hair, and ten inches of horrifically thick hair isn't the easiest thing to fit under a wig) and took to wearing wigs similar to those her mother had brought into fashion. She wasn't sure why, but she felt inclined to. Indigo had been in her forties; even though her whole life Effie had been watching kids die against her will, she still thought that her mom was too young to have died.

The next year, she had her first Victor. The girl's name had been Briar Rose Allardyce; Effie had remembered watching the Opening Ceremony with baited breath - her Tributes had been airbrushed with what appeared to be black glitter and were dressed like coal miners per the norm; Kaileb Clarke, her boy, in typical miner's garb in pearlescent white and Briar like a miner-themed stripper, which she hadn't found too fair, - sobbing to herself when Kaileb had died, being ecstatic when she had reached the final two, and when she had disposed of District 1's boy and won, she had accidentally hugged Haymitch under the mistaken impression that he was Caesar (to be fair, he was suffering from either a serious hangover or some sort of vomiting bug, and she had forced him to tie his hair back in a ponytail so that she didn't have to keep holding it out of his face when he threw up.)

The arena that year had been ice-themed, and Briar had been crowned Victor three months later, having lost a hand to frostbite (and part of her nose, but that hadn't been too hard to reconstruct) she had been kept in a coma for two months and then a month 'coming to terms' with her handicap, (despite the fact that she'd been fitted with a pretty much fully-functional bionic replacement that was as good as a real hand.) 'Coming to terms' usually involved the mini-bar, Haymitch and a bottle or two of the strong blue watermelon-flavoured liquor that the eighteen-year old had taken a liking for.

The Victory Tour that year had been a nightmare; Effie now had not one but two drunks on her hands - and neither of them had any respect for her whatsoever; one was about her age and the other years older, which made it doubly hard as she had little if any age-based authority over them (that counted for authority of any sort, come to think of it.) She had kept herself up almost all night every night writing speeches for each and every District's vigil. She had fallen out with her new stylist, some utterly brain-dead piece of fluff named Clarissa, over the colour of one of her dresses or the shape of her nails or something trivial like that (she had been PMS'ing, though) and they had made it around eleven Districts until they got back to Twelve; Briar had broken down in tears on the stage when she tried to open her mouth to read out Kaileb's vigil, and had run off stage crying.

Effie had found her in her bedroom on the train surrounded by bloody vomit later that evening, smashed bottles on the floor and a simple note of 'The odds were never in my favour' sitting on the nightstand. Effie had thrown up when she saw this scene. Haymitch probably should have taken it as a wake-up call, but he had a bottle of booze in his hand when they came to remove her body, so she decided that he was probably beyond help. When she arrived back in the Capitol, she was still prone to bursting out crying at random moments. She left Caesar to find out why by himself; he knew everything about anybody who was anybody without her telling him anyway, surely he could find this one out by himself?

The year they started living together when Effie was twenty-nine was the year that he told her he was bisexual, though this came as no great surprise whatsoever. Externally, or at least on screen and stage, there was a lot more gay than straight in him, though never once had he mentioned having had anything special at all with another bloke. She could see that it bothered him, but she didn't care. His sexual preference was none of her business, and she wasn't someone who was bothered by these things. She and Caesar just continued shopping, socialising and being fabulous as they always had done every other day of the year and pretended not to know each other when the Games were on and the cameras were out. Keeping their relationship behind closed doors was pretty much vital because the very idea of the Master of Ceremonies and the escort of 'lowly' District 12 would be far too much of a 'hugely stupid, massive scandal' as Caesar had put it on one occasion for the Capitol's poor brains to even begin to comprehend it in a logical manner.

Prospero, her vainglorious older brother who continued to make her life miserable wherever he could manage, was promoted to Head Gamemaker for the 71st, 72nd and 73rd Games, and Effie soon noticed that he was never far from the side of the President at almost all of the Capitol's prestigious social events and parties. It soon clicked that this was perhaps why her and Haymitch's Tributes seldom lasted more than a day in the arena and why she hadn't been promoted from the 'underdog' beginner district that new escorts seldom worked with for any longer than three years. It had been more than that by now; she couldn't even be bothered counting, but she did know that she had been wiping up vomit and finding Haymitch's dirty y-fronts in her shoes for too long now.

Then things started looking up again. Prospero lost his job to a guy named Seneca Crane for the 74th games. Effie had never gotten past the Victory Tour with a live Victor, and now all of a sudden she had two. This seemed to make Haymitch get his act together after all these years for some reason. They offered her a new post with District 1, but she refused. There were _her_ victors, Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark - the Girl on Fire and the Boy with the Bread - and she was becoming the face of District 12's Hunger Games. District 12 was fast becoming one of the most popular Districts.

Of course, she still had Caesar. She had woken up on her 34th birthday to find his space beside her in their bed empty, and assuming that he'd been called for early-morning rehearsals for tonight's show, she just got on with her morning. She had been sitting at the kitchen counter with toast and a mug of hot chocolate - with cream and marshmallows, dusted with cinnamon; this was something she had always been very specific about - in her dressing gown, playing with her fringe when the doorbell had rung.

She had opened it to find Caesar, his hair loose to his shoulders and dyed the exact shade of lilac he knew was her favourite colour. He was dressed in a black shirt with the top three buttons open and matching trousers, a gold stud in his right ear. In his hands he was holding the biggest bunch of hothouse lilies she had ever seen in her life. Without a word, he handed them to her and dropped to one knee.

Their wedding had been arranged to be held as soon as the Games were over.

* * *

** Depressing irony FTW! Thanks for reading!**


End file.
